Revitalizing Rio de Janeiro

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At a time when much of the world is in some form of decline, Rio
de Janeiro is the view looking forward; it feels like the capital
of hope. The wave of change owes something to the booming
Brazilian economy, something to the discovery of offshore oil,
something to the energy brought to the city when it was chosen
for the 2014 World Cup finals and the 2016 Olympics, and most of
all to the dramatic reduction in crime. All of these changes are
elaborately intertwined, each the condition of the others. Rio
has not achieved the placidity of Zurich or Reykjavík, but just
as every small joy feels like rapture after a depression, the
improvement in Rio has an aura of fiesta, even of miracle, that
those serene towns will never know.

A great many cities sit beside the sea, but no other integrates
the ocean as Rio does. You can imagine San Francisco positioned
inland, or Miami when the sand washes away, but to imagine Rio
without the waterfront is like imagining New York without tall
buildings, Paris without bistros, L.A. without celebrities. The
landscape has an almost Venetian urgency. “If you don’t go to the
beach you don’t know anything that’s happening,” said the Rio-
and New York–based artist Vik Muniz. “No matter if you have
Twitter, or if you have a cell phone, you have to go to the
beach, every day at four o’clock until sundown.” Beaches are
inherently democratic institutions; when you’re in a bathing
suit, there’s no way to show off anything much besides your body,
your skill at volleyball, your aura of cool. It’s pointless being
a snob in Rio.

Rio’s topography has dictated another social anomaly. People of
privilege live in the flat seaside areas in the Zona Sul, the
southern district that encompasses the famous beaches of
Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon. These neighborhoods are
punctuated by abrupt hills, which have been settled by the poor
over the past century or so. These steep favelas do not appear in
detail on most maps of the city, and have historically had no
utilities, no garbage collection, no closed sewers, and no police
protection. The social distances in Rio outpace the geographic
ones. Muniz said, “You’re sitting in St.-Tropez surrounded by
Mogadishu.”

Much of Brazilian culture originated in Rio’s favelas. Samba
evolved here, and the new funk music, too. Many soccer stars came
out of the favelas, and some of Brazil’s famous models were born
there. Carnival in Rio depends on the “samba schools” of the
favelas, which compete to put on the most glittering display.
French aristocrats never say that France would be nothing without
the slums of Paris, and most upper-class Italians are embarrassed
by the Mafia; hip-hop culture notwithstanding, most Americans opt
for the suburbs. But in Rio de Janeiro, those who have privilege
admire those who don’t. You may or may not choose, as a tourist,
to go up to the favelas, but if you love Rio, it’s for a paradigm
that is contingent on them.

Nowhere is this unusual arrangement more apparent than from the
air. My husband and I went hang-gliding one morning from the
Tijuca Forest, soaring above the snaking alleys of Vidigal on one
side and luxury oceanfront hotels on the other. You know Rio a
whole new way when you have looked at its skyscrapers from the
sky they are scraping. A few days later, we took a helicopter
ride over the city at sunset, observing the Olympic facilities
under construction, noting how the favelas are distributed like
chocolate chips in a cookie, rich and poor alike under the gaze
of the towering Christ of Corcovado.

Rio is smattered with 18th-century buildings in varying states of
disrepair, scores of cakelike examples of the Belle Époque, and a
profusion of exuberant Midcentury Modernist office towers and
apartment buildings. Oscar Niemeyer is the architect of the most
curvaceous—epitomized by his flying saucer of a museum
across the bay in Niterói. These sinewy structures appear to
exquisite advantage beside the black-and-white-patterned
beachfront sidewalks by visionary landscape architect Roberto
Burle Marx, who also designed the city’s best parks. Most
cities obfuscate the nature they have usurped, but Rio looks
as though it had been painted onto the underlying topography
in order to nuance its sweeping undulations. We stayed in fine
hotels; when we arrived at the
Fasano with our two-year-old, a pillow embroidered with his
name was waiting in the crib. I ate at chic restaurants such as
Gero and
Satyricon, and I hit the shops for trendy Rio brands such as
Osklen. I heard some excellent Brazilian jazz; I took a
half-day trip to see the golden lion tamarins in the Poço das
Antas Biological Reserve. But for me, Rio at this moment is not
about tourist attractions; it is about renaissance. As in Moscow
at the end of communism, Johannesburg at the end of apartheid,
and Beijing when China opened to capitalism, the sights are
secondary to the electrifying current of transformation.